Series vehicles of medium and high price categories are increasingly equipped with systems that enhance active safety in addition to passive safety systems, such as safety belts, airbags, deformation zones, and side-impact protection systems. Active safety systems include, for example, anti-lock systems, systems for traction slip control and, most recently, systems for yaw torque control during cornering. Systems for increasing active safety require, apart from an electronic controller which furnishes specifications for intervention into the brake system, additional components in the vehicle which permit sensing the driving condition, on the one hand, and control intervention, on the other hand. Such vehicle components include, sensors to measure the yaw velocity or the transverse vehicle acceleration render systems which enhance the active safety. Unfortunately these sensors increase vehicle costs. Therefore, an important development aim is to minimize costs for systems of this type. One related objective is, for example, that condition variables which can only be measured by expensive sensors shall be reproduced by signals of less expensive sensors or sensors which are already provided in the system.
German patent application No. 42 16 301 discloses a method that obviates the need for a yaw rate sensor to determine the yaw velocity of a vehicle, i.e., the angular speed about the vertical vehicle axis. Instead of a yaw rate sensor, two axially offset transverse acceleration sensors are mounted into the vehicle. The signals of the sensors provide values for the front and rear transverse accelerations of the vehicle. This renders possible in a simple manner to determine the yaw angle acceleration and the transverse vehicle acceleration without taking a rolling motion into consideration. When the rolling motion of a vehicle during cornering is additionally taken into account, this complicates the entire calculating operation but finally furnishes a result.